Help: 61000 Photos Need Tagging
I need your advice. With 61000+ photos I am, again, stuck between Picasa v2.0 and Adobe’s Photoshop Album v3.0 to process and organise all my shots from the silly to the sublime.
Picasa – I love the ease of use of Picasa’s quick and easy photo editing – cropping, simple adjustments of fill-light/shadow/highlight, tinting, collage making tools, sharpening, etc. I hate Picasa’s lack of effective tagging and it’s categorization/indexing which requires you to move your photos to specific folders for each category.
Photoshop Album – I love Adobe’s quick and easy tagging –
just drag and drop onto the photo; and its time line and tag indexing – just click the tags you want to see and the appropriate photos are displayed. Because of how my brain works I like my photos organised with the other photos I took at the same time. Because of how my brain doesn’t work, I need to tag my photos heavily for future personal and professional use.
Whining – I don’t love having to use separate programs for each separate task. I don’t love having to import photos twice with two different pieces of software. I don’t love having to process each photo twice – once to ensure it’s pretty and then again to tagged it for future reference.
So I’m turning to you. What would you suggest? How do you do it? Any new tools that have fixed all these problems for you?
Cross Posted to Vox Groups: Photographers & Food Photography & Photography
This might be way out there because you’re using Photoshop Album, but if you’ve got the full version of photoshop, have you though about Adobe Bridge? It’s not perfect, but it’s the closest I get to having everything all in one place. Tagged, keyworded, sorted, previewed, and…straight into photoshop with one click.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom sounds like it might be the ticket for you — “Import, manage, and showcase large volumes of digital images”.
Unfortunately, it is still in beta. I played with it for a few days and it looks fantastic (comparable to something like Aperture for Mac).
It might be worth holding out if you like the beta, available here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/
Hmm. I think my mind is in “developer” mode tonight. The first thing that popped in my head was a PHP frontend to a MySQL database (PHP-to-MSAccess is more effort).
Extracting and storing EXIF data would, of course, be a basic requirement; PHP modules would appear to exist in support of this.
I can imagine simple, popular tags in checkboxes; additional tags in text input; some means of identifying specific elements within a picture using HTML “MAP” or similar (e.g. clicking on the pic applies a text label to the indicated (x,y)+delta).
A few additional thumbnails can be included on the page as well, for navigating to the next photo. Bulk selection could also help with labelling.
Of course, this doesn’t really help your photo editing, but I do note that “toucanmultimedia.com” has a limited php-based photo editor; I have no idea what their licensing terms might entail.